It is obvious that open source tools for predictive analytics are gaining more and more momentum. Just last month, the KDNuggets.com website ran a poll which asked visitors to vote for the tools they had used for a real project in the last 12 months. The result … more than 50% of the respondents said they used open-source tools such as R, KNIME, and RapidMiner. Now, it may be that the responses are really not that representative of the entire data mining community, but they do reflect a trend: open source data mining tools are here to stay and their use is growing as they become better and easier to use. And, guess what? Their support for PMML is stronger than ever.

Rapid-I has just released an extension for RapidMiner offering the export of PMML for several modeling techniques. KNIME continues to expand its PMML support with new capabilities … and Weka has just announced support for Support Vector Machines (in addition to several other PMML elements). Augustus from Open Data supports segmented models expressed in PMML. The …

It is obvious that open source tools for predictive analytics are gaining more and more momentum. Just last month, the KDNuggets.com website ran a poll which asked visitors to vote for the tools they had used for a real project in the last 12 months. The result … more than 50% of the respondents said they used open-source tools such as R, KNIME, and RapidMiner. Now, it may be that the responses are really not that representative of the entire data mining community, but they do reflect a trend: open source data mining tools are here to stay and their use is growing as they become better and easier to use. And, guess what? Their support for PMML is stronger than ever.

Rapid-I has just released an extension for RapidMiner offering the export of PMML for several modeling techniques. KNIME continues to expand its PMML support with new capabilities … and Weka has just announced support for Support Vector Machines (in addition to several other PMML elements). Augustus from Open Data supports segmented models expressed in PMML. The Zementis PMML Converter tool, which unifies the different versions of PMML into a single version is now also a corrector and it will soon support PMML 4.0.

There is also news from commercial vendors, Pervasive has announced support for PMML in DataRush. The Zementis ADAPA decisioning platform which is available as a service on the Amazon Cloud now offers the seamless integration of models expressed in PMML and business rules.

Last but not least, the Data Mining Group (DMG), which is responsible for developing PMML is constantly expanding. NASA has recently joined the DMG, so chances are PMML will grow out of this world and into the stars. According to the DMG website (dmg.org):

“The NASA Data Mining & Trending Working Group (DMTWG) was established to strengthen data/text mining and trending within and across NASA datasets, to aid in the identification and mitigation of adverse trends and to raise the awareness and capability of data/text mining within the agency. “

From down under, Togaware has also joined the DMG. Togaware’s most well known product is Rattle, an open-source data mining tool built on top of R that produces and consumes PMML. Togaware maintains the PMML package for R which can be obtained from CRAN, the free “app store” for R users.